The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance
By Colin Raymond, T. Matthews, Radley Horton. Science Advances, 2020
606 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Humid heat extremes are rapidly increasing and may have already briefly exceeded humans’ physiological survivability limit. Humans’ ability to efficiently shed heat has enabled us to range over every continent, but a wet-bulb temperature (TW) of 35°C marks our upper physiological limit, and much lower values have serious health and productivity impacts. Climate models project the first 35°C TW occurrences by the mid-21st century. However, a comprehensive evaluation of weather station data shows that some coastal subtropical locations have already reported a TW of 35°C and that extreme humid heat overall has more than doubled in frequency since 1979. Recent exceedances of 35°C in global maximum sea surface temperature provide further support for the validity of these dangerously high TW values. We find the most extreme humid heat is highly localized in both space and time and is correspondingly substantially underestimated in reanalysis products. Our findings thus underscore the serious challenge posed by humid heat that is more intense than previously reported and increasingly severe.
Subfields: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Physiology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d2120f78553ba8594439c650ca1773f7fcb14a96
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Citations in the corpus
- Quantifying the human cost of global warming (2022, background): “At wet-bulb temperature (WBT) >28 °C, the effectiveness of sweating in cooling the body decreases, and WBT ~35 °C can be fatal 41,42 especially for more vulnerable individuals 43 (as the body can no longer cool itself).”
- The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change (2020, neutral): “…lead to the catastrophic outcomes that some scientists now openly contemplate (Kulp & Strauss, 2019; Lenton et al., 2019; Lynas, 2020; Moses, 2020; Raymond et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2019; Xu et al., 2020; Yumashev et al., 2019), then these Neoclassical economists will be complicit in causing the…”
- Global urban population exposure to extreme heat (2021, background): “This geographic pattern parallels recent global analysis of station observations of extreme humid heat that suggest areas of the planet may soon exceed human biophysical capacity, regardless of local acclimatization (17).”